The crowd said little as Williams showed what she had discovered in city archives and PDC documents. It was shocking. Yet it was the kind of thing that happened in urban areas across the country in the 1960s, she said.

Standing in the way were people and business owners bunched into the Albina community by segregation laws and practices -- people like Rice's mother.

Dessie Fowler was a caterer and housekeeper in her early 60s. She was living alone after a divorce but renting out a basement apartment to make ends meet.

Portland City ArchivesOne of the North Portland houses labeled "blighted" to make way for an Emanuel Hospital expansion that never came.

To demolish the Albina area, the consulting firm advised Emanuel to get the City Council and the PDC to declare the area blighted. Then they could enforce eminent domain.

The PDC labeled 96 percent of the houses and businesses "blighted" -- a loose term. A house more than 50 years old could be described that way, Williams said. So could a house if it had a claw-foot tub.

More local history events sponsored by the City of Portland for Black History Month:

The City Council declared the area blighted in 1964. The PDC wrecking ball didn't begin to tear down 160 houses and 28 businesses until 1970. The destruction continued until President Richard Nixon in 1974 slashed federal funding and the expansion died.

In its wake lay bull-dozed acres, parking lots around an eight-block area surrounding what is now Legacy Emanuel, and a deep wound in the community.

After Williams finished her presentation, she asked for personal stories.

When soft-spoken Rice began, his voice was hard to hear in the back of the room.

"I owned a duplex at 628 N. Monroe Street, but it didn't affect me that much," he said.

What it did to his mother, however, was a different matter.

She was leasing to own a house at 312 N. Knott Street when a man knocked on the door and told her not to pay her rent while the hospital was expanding.

She did as she was told.

After she lost the house, her two grown sons looked into how she had been fleeced.

She grew up in the Jim Crow South, so they knew she asked the white man in the suit and tie few questions and didn't demand a business card.

Her sons took her case to court and a judge agreed she had been swindled. Historians don't know who the man worked for, only that his purpose may have been to remove any legal claim from the house.

The judge allowed her to live in her home for a year.

Rice's mother moved twice after that. Her health declined. She died at 63, less than two years after leaving her home of 20 years.